Multi-Scalar Governance and Institutions : Intentional Development and the Conditions of Possibility in the Extractive Sector

The World development report (WDR) 2017 is centrally interested in the conditions under which three headline development outcomes (growth, equity, security) can be achieved by improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of governance institutions. This background paper explores all three mechanisms through the lens of efforts to improve the governance of extractive industries, in particular, to enhance the dividend of growth, equity, and security for host countries in the Global South. The authors consider the case of the extractive industries transparency initiative (EITI) which may be understood as an assemblage of power, norms, and capacities to create new institutional arrangements to govern relations between oil companies, host country governments, and citizens. The point of departure is the WDR’s recognition that institutions are always exercises in and products of, that is to say they are thorough saturated with, power. The structure of the paper is as follows part one begins by noting that a feature of globalization in the post-cold war period has been the development of a range of global modalities to intervene in the regulation of economic activity and to reconfigure the power, norms, and capacities of governance institutions so as to achieve particular equity and security outcomes. Part two provides an account of the conditions of possibility, all traceable to the character of post-cold war globalization, that saw the rise of the norms and rules central to EITI that, in little over ten years have enrolled 48 countries and more than 80 major oil, gas, and mining companies. Part three examines the apparently paradoxical case of EITI’s enthusiastic adoption in Nigeria